The Far East Futurists Collection (Artistic and Publishing Aspects)

This interdisciplinary research focuses on the Far East futurists literary and art collections published during the first years of Soviet rule and aims at determining their genre and style specificity within the Futurist aesthetic paradigm in the context of the developing book publishing business in a remote Russian region. The material used by the author is understudied and has hardly ever been subject to system analysis in terms of correlating literary and publishing practices of the early Soviet years and the Allied Intervention in the Far East (1918-1920). The artistic and publishing rise in Vladivostok during this period was determined by the development of local creative forces and exported metropolitan futurism. Among the most prominent publishing projects were Fain and Lepestki sakury (Sakura Petals) literary collections with their typical futurist “primacy of poetics over poetry” (T.V. Kazarinova). The Parnas mezhdu sopok (Parnassus Between the Hills) collection demonstrated a stricter genrestyle unity of poetic texts. Some researchers also mention another legendary Far Eastern collection - Moskva na vzmor'ye: Futuristicheskaya khrestomatiya (Moscow on the Shore: A Futuristic Reader) by leading Russian Futuris poets V. Mayakovsky, V. Khlebnikov, V. Kamensky, N. Aseev, V. Ryabinin, D. Burliuk. In 1920, the centre of the Far Eastern literary life moved to Chita, which was the capital of a nominally independent Far Eastern Republic (FER) until 1922. This period saw the boom of publicshing business with its search for original book formats. Such were almanac-type collections of modernist poetry, published as a supplement to Theater and Art Magazine. Of great interest are N. Chuzhak's historical and scholarly collections Neravnodushnyye strochki (Fascinated Lines) and Sibirskiy motiv v poezii (Siberian Motive in Poetry), which were rather close, yet not exactly conforming the formal criteria for a literary collection. In Chita and Blagoveshchensk there appeared a cooperative book publishing house “Utes”, whose first edition was a literary almanac with the same name. The value of the literary collection Kameny (Camenae) initiated by the historical-literary circle at the Institute of Public Education is that it provides the scholarly and literary base for the creatively vigorous, but short-term activities of the Far Eastern publishing houses. Thus, the leading genre of the Far Eastern publishing in the early Soviet years was an almanac-type collection of poems, developing in the context of high-quality regional periodicals aimed at promoting Futurist ideology and aesthetics.

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